


Exhibition

by Allothi



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-19
Updated: 2011-03-19
Packaged: 2017-10-17 03:04:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/172239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allothi/pseuds/Allothi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ficlet. AU. Eames is an artist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exhibition

**Author's Note:**

> Commentfic from a thread in Ifrit's LJ, slightly expanded.

The exhibition opens to a respectable amount of media attention. Write-ups in the broadsheets, a few longer pieces in the more specialist press, earnest discussion on Radio Four and the World Service, an argument on The Culture Show. Eames lurches between complete, oblivious absorption in his latest project and complete, narcissistic absorption in his reviews.

Arthur experiences it all at one remove. He's invested in Eames' career and it matters to him -- it matters intensely -- that Eames get the recognition he deserves. Arthur, too, follows all the reviews, and the bad ones make him furious, and the good ones make his heart sing. At the same time, he has his own work that he knows he's good at, his own recognition in his own field, his own separate self-image that isn't at risk of damage because Richard Dorment in the Telegraph opines that Eames should've stuck to sculpture. And so the real depths and peaks of emotion are left to Eames.

About two weeks into the exhibition they go to the gallery themselves. Eames wants to see how his stuff looks in normal viewing hours and how the ordinary public are responding to it. Arthur likes the idea and decides to go with him.

They arrive around lunchtime and so head first for the café, where the soup turns out to be decent, the sandwiches dry and parsimonious, the coffee undrinkable. Arthur finishes his soup and sits back and people watches whilst Eames dispatches everything else. It's a Saturday, the café is crowded and several people give Arthur odd glances they try to hide, as though he's someone it's important not to look at. Arthur nudges Eames' leg with his foot under the table and Eames says something probably-filthy, mouth open and full of sandwich.

They're not in a hurry to get to the pictures. They've seen them before, after all. They stop off on the way to take a look at the new installation by Georgina Starr. And then it's up the stairs to floor four, _Charles Eames_ written in big, bare capitals at the entrance to this part of the gallery.

The exhibition includes 72 photos of Arthur, all post coitum, all but three plainly displaying the red, sore ring of Arthur's anus, and all labelled simply with Arthur's full name and then a number, anywhere from 132 to 923. Eames took over a thousand pictures in total, Arthur knows, and spent weeks, maybe months on his selections.

#479 is from a day Arthur remembers vividly. Eames was eating in bed, bowl, spoon and fingers, but he put the bowl down on the floor and smiled at Arthur, visible in Eames' kitchen through the open doorway, when Arthur put down the FT. They fucked slowly, sweating, curtains drawn and windows closed in a London heatwave, and afterwards Eames arranged Arthur on his front, two pillows under his hips, head turned to face the windows, curtains now partly open to let in the right kind of light. "Imagine you own the world," Eames said, low, soft and urgent, and Arthur did, it was easy, Eames' come sticky about the edge of his hole.

He can still smell the scent of the curry Eames had been eating. Eames dipped his fingers in the congealed sauce and drew a line that curves in the photo over Arthur's ass to his lower back, where it ends in a tiny rubble of bits of cauliflower and meat. "Just for kicks," Eames said. There is also a mark at the juncture of Arthur's neck and shoulder from where Eames had sucked a bruise on a previous day. The colour in the photo is soft, with a nostalgic feel, so that when you remember it later you might remember it in sepia or black and white.

Arthur walks along the row of photos, studying each familiar image carefully, mindful of the effect they produce selected and arranged as they have been, interested by the way it feels to walk from one past a gap of white bare wall to the neat black frame of the next.

"You love this, don't you," Eames murmurs, voice thick. "You're a deviant."

"You took the photos," Arthur says. "You put them on display."

"I'm an _artist_ ," Eames says. His fingers brush down Arthur's spine.


End file.
